Edited by Farnoosh Fathi

Poems by Leonardo Gandolfi

Translated by Farnoosh Fathi

This story directly involves a cat and a bird.The cat’s name is Colignon, he’s been living with usfor a few years. The rest doesn’t matter so muchand will matter even less in time whenthe difference between beginning and endfogs up. We had just movedto the new house a couple months earlierand the bird (a little dove) only enters the storybecause it was young enough to permit itselfto be the target of Colignon’s sharp claws,the cat with whom we learned in due timeof love at its most negligent and filial.I never exactly liked poetry, much lessManuel Bandeira and little birdsbut settling scores is costly and hasbeen costly — whether it’s with the cat or the booksdoesn’t matter: it is a road that, for now,has no return. Layer after layer of forgotten datesor dates that are about to be forgotten underpoints of view of people whom we may ormay not like (same difference)until, with our loads, we reach the smalland deep abyss of how and why one daywe went numb. To think there will always besome dove crossing my neighborhood sky,to think that there always will be new houseswith people in them who more or lesslove each other and more or less love their neighbor.And to think all kinds of things.But what really stays with me is the knowledgethat that little bird was only the first thingto die in that house so firmly groundedand with such a handsome cat.

In the plane you want me to close the windowbut, see, my hands are tied.Of all things, this wind strikes your facefor this wind is above all the imageyou chose for your dead daughter, from whichyou still don’t know how to release yourself.However, we know — and with some certainty —that resurrection as we had conceived of itis just an unlikely hypothetical. And so it may be necessaryto choose between patience and haste. And for nowyou are the one responsible for differentiating one from the other.At this point the stewardess is startled by the wind,but she doesn’t know what to do either. See,my hands are tied, she says, let me callthe captain. But the captain doesn’t come.It resembles sadness but is less subtle because it doesn’t endand so what we recognize as happinessin some way proves itself atavic and discontinuous.Does anyone want to change seats? You, it seems,are distracted by a few of my remarks onan Isabel Allende book having to do with something or other.In this case tears are a minor detail.Mine represent the closest I have ever gottento what my father calls disinterested love.Yours is the clearest image I have ever hadof what we’ve come to know as — pardon the expression —an open wound. The wind dishevels all of your longhair and thoughts, as the plane in which weare, crosses an ocean of descriptive certainties.

When I wrote Do you know the wayto San Jose, there were a few flourishesin the arrangement that didn’t make the final cutrecorded by Dionne Warwick in 1968.The most noteworthy of these was perhapsa small break in the rhythm midwaythrough the song, further indicated by anote change from three trumpets that were,at that time, filling blank spaces.Although quick, that break always remindedme of when my father used to take meto a bar half a mile from our house,the chords of a piano I would never hear again.Now, years later, when I play Do youknow the way to San Jose, I thinkof my father. The song I wrote certainlydoesn’t tell of this, the suspicion bothfitting and unreasonable that keeps us apartfrom our own. A damp old chill that,as I was later to realize, from action to stalllasts no more than a few seconds.

Editor/translator Farnoosh Fathi has curated this feature devoted to three contemporary Brazilian poets who illustrate the radical openness and idiosyncratic mixing that Fathi says characterizes their moment: Angélica Freitas, Leonardo Gandolfi, and Ismar Tirelli Neto “redefine the terms of the poetic and the political.”